So I found that registering the Iraqi domain raf.iq more important than live blogging the full talk at SMXeast. Why will be explained below and yes they have SEO benefits. Fortunately, Outspoken Media’s, Lisa Barone has written a great post about the Pumping WordPress for SEO (part1) session.
Jon was up next touching on many areas of WordPress and SEO but to your Web AddiCT some things you should really consider, which we don’t do all of yet is…
Quality Indicators
- Terms of Service
- Privacy Policy
- Public WHOis
- Phone Number
- Physical Address
- Accessibility
- Microformats: http://hen.sh/2w
Rae was up next to continue the Pumping SEO for WordPress session and what stood out for me was …
URL Shorterning
Create your own URL shorterner. It’s very easy to do with WordPress.
- Branding: Do you want TinyURL getting your branding or do you want to keep it yourself?
- Control: All of the old zi.ma URLs are now gone because the service went away. We don’t want that happening to our links.
- Tweetjacking: Only you can create short URLs on your own site. Protects someone from replacing your links with their spam links.
- Link juice: Stop losing popularity by controlling how it redirects. You want to make sure you’re using a 301 NOT a 302.
Link Shortcut Plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/link-shortcut/
See now why raf.iq was registered? Also check out the Outspoken post on how to create your own URL shortener.
She then continued to go on and on about the Thesis theme and its benefits for SEO while I registered a domain I’ve been dreaming about for years http://raf.iq 
Michael Gray then handled the Q&A session.
Michael Gray: If you’re going to put your posts into multiple categories and tags, use the More tag so your post isn’t duplicated. When you’re doing your blog posts, title your posts with keywords in them. There are plugins that let you write punchy times but keep the keywords in the Title tag.
How do you improve your WordPress category pages?
Michael: He goes with the Thesis ones.
Rae: Keep your categories limited because it will make them stronger. There’s a plugin called Custom Query String that will let you pick how many posts show up on your category page.
I strongly recommend visiting the Outspoken Media post about this session with tons of useful links that will assist SEO for your WordPress blog/CMS.
